Sunday, March 26, 2017

My impression of the Defence establishment, admittedly from
the perspective of an outsider who claims no special insight, is that it has a
lot in common with the Catholic Church. Both are insular, hierarchical
institutions that observe rituals and traditions that can seem mystifying to
the uninitiated. This is not a criticism; it’s just a fact.

Both also strike me as being unaccustomed to, and therefore resentful
of, outside scrutiny. Their natural instinct, when under criticism, is to close
ranks and go into self-protection mode.

That seems to be what’s happened over allegations of
civilian deaths in Afghanistan. The Defence Force has put its helmet on, hunkered
down in its foxhole and is now waiting in the hope that the shelling will stop. Like the
Catholic Church in its response to sexual abuse scandals, it seems ill-equipped
to deal with public relations crises.

The government, too, seems to be hoping this will all blow
over. Bill English appears to assume that the bland “Nothing to see here, folks”
line that so often worked for John Key will be effective here too. He and other ministers are counting on public respect
for the SAS and suspicion of Nicky Hager’s motives to pull the government
through unharmed. Besides, it all happened so long ago and far away.

I think they’re wrong. Yes, lots of people don’t want to think
badly of our much-admired SAS and would rather not be confronted by the unpleasant
possibility that they might have killed innocent people. But as human rights
lawyer Marianne Elliott said in a thoughtful and balanced response to questions
on Q+A this morning, even good people
can make mistakes.

There are two issues here: whether the SAS did what’s
alleged, and whether it was then covered up to avoid embarrassment. Both
questions are troubling, but the latter arguably more so. Soldiers shooting the
wrong people in a war zone, in the (presumably genuine) belief that their lives were threatened,
is one thing; drawing a veil over it in the hope that no one would find out is
quite another.

I wish we could be confident that the Defence Force would have
been scrupulous in wanting to get to the truth of the matter, admit any error and
atone for mistakes made, but the evidence suggests otherwise. I think the NZDF has made the mistake of taking the Catholic Church as its damage-control model. It’s surely only
a matter of time before English and his ministers will have to accept that the
allegations are too serious to be brushed aside.

Thursday, March 23, 2017

I tuned into the BBC World
Service in the middle of the night recently, as one does, and found myself
listening to an interview with an American woman whose identity, since I came in part-way through, was not evident to me.

She was lamenting the
appalling state of the world and the heartlessness of the people who allow it
to be that way.

Donald Trump wasn’t
mentioned, but he might as well have been, along with all the other people in
positions of power who apparently don’t care about the downtrodden and
marginalised.

It was a familiar display of
verbal hand-wringing. She had that slightly whiny tone sometimes adopted by
people who know exactly what’s wrong with the world, if only others could share
their insight and compassion.

It should have come as no
surprise to learn, when the interview ended, that I’d been listening to
Angelina Jolie. And I found myself analysing what it is about Jolie and others
of her ilk – such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Bono, Emma Thompson, Sean Penn and even
my favourite actress, Meryl Streep – that makes my hackles rise when I hear
them pontificating about all the injustice in the world.

To be fair, Jolie at least
puts her money where her mouth is. You could argue she has earned the right to
pontificate through her humanitarian work with refugees and displaced persons.

The others, I’m not sure
about. Bono, for instance, seems to do most of his supposed philanthropy with
his mouth.

It seems to me that the main
reason these people pontificate is that an admiring media provides them with a ready-made
platform.

They don’t have to
demonstrate any serious commitment to the causes they espouse. (Again, Jolie is
an exception here.) It’s enough that they have half-baked opinions on emotive
issues such as poverty and refugees.

I regard this as a misuse, if
not abuse, of their privileged position. They seem to assume that their
celebrity status confers some sort of moral authority on them.

Well, it doesn’t. They have
no more moral authority than the bank teller, the bus driver and the
supermarket checkout operator.

The only difference is that
wealth and, crucially, media adulation gives Hollywood stars – and some rock
singers too – the luxury of being able to present themselves as the conscience
of the Western world. They are encouraged in this belief by fawning
interviewers who never ask hard questions.

But what are they, really?
They are performers. Jolie is an actor, and many would say not a particularly
good one. And what do actors do? They make immense sums of money by pretending
to be other people.

They recite words written by
others and are made to look good by skilled directors, cinematographers, film
editors and (not least) makeup artists.

They haven’t climbed
mountains, performed acts of heroism, made ground-breaking scientific
discoveries or written great books. Yet for some reason people genuflect before
them in awe.

Good for Jolie if she spends
some of her wealth helping less fortunate people, but that doesn’t endow her
with infinite wisdom. It doesn’t mean she knows the answers to the intractable
problems dogging the world.

And here’s another thing.
Activist celebrities enjoy the luxury of being able to pontificate without ever
having to deliver results.

Unlike the politicians they
often condemn, they don’t have to make complex policy decisions or choose
between agonisingly conflicting priorities. And unlike politicians in a
democracy, who must face the voters every few years, they are not accountable
to anyone.

They don’t, for example, have
to confront redundant workers from Detroit car plants or Pennsylvania steel
mills who voted for the despised Trump because they felt robbed of hope and
dignity. And they don’t have to face people from previously safe, stable
Western European societies that have been ravaged by the multiculturalism that
stars like Jolie espouse.

But they have money. They fly
around the world in first-class or in private jets, apparently choosing to
ignore their rather substantial carbon footprint (although still tut-tutting
about climate change).

They stay in five-star luxury
lodges and address $1000-a-head charity dinners. How much more agreeable than
having to find fair and practicable solutions to real problems or to be held
accountable for real results.

Oh, and they can afford to
adopt children from Third World countries to demonstrate their kindness and
their passion for diversity.

Adoptees from the Third World
sometimes look like the latest Hollywood fashion accessory. Why not adopt
children from their own country? They’re often just as needy. But it wouldn’t
look as exotic, and it wouldn’t score quite so many political points.

Just once, I would like an
interviewer to confront celebrity activists such as Jolie with the unarguable fact that capitalism and
globalisation, which Jolie apparently blames for many of the world’s ills, have
raised more people out of poverty, and eliminated more disease, than any of the
fuzzy, ill-defined but fashionably soft-left ideologies promoted by her and
others like her.

Saturday, March 18, 2017

It’s a sensitive subject because we know that tens of
thousands of New Zealand women, in fact probably hundreds of thousands, have
had abortions.

They will have had them for a variety of reasons – some
compelling, others perhaps less so.

We know from Abortion Supervisory Committee reports that
some women have had multiple abortions. Of those who had abortions in 2015, 43
had had seven or more, 74 had had six and 193 had had five, which suggests they
regarded the procedure as no big deal and presumably no great cause for regret.

But a much greater number of women will have agonised over
the decision, and a significant number will have suffered psychological
consequences.

Decades of feminist insistence that abortion is simply a
matter of women’s rights and women’s health won’t necessarily have made them
feel any better about getting rid of the human life taking shape inside them.

Some will have seen the 2015 film Room, starring Brie Larson in an Oscar-winning performance as a
woman who has been held captive as a sex slave for seven years.

In that time she has given birth to a boy, fathered by her
captor. Mother and son live in total isolation from the outside world,
imprisoned in a soundproofed garden shed.

The film’s appeal stems largely from the warmth and empathy
between the woman and her smart, inquisitive son, whom she loves with a fierce
passion.

It’s a daring film because it challenges the notion that the
only option for a woman made pregnant through rape is to have the baby aborted.

Of course the rape victim in Room had no choice. But the film’s clear message is that even a
child fathered by a monster and conceived against the mother’s will - in other words, an unwanted child - can be
loved and cherished.

In this respect, the film is almost subversive, because it
offers a counter-narrative to the one that dominates the abortion debate.

This is an issue so polarised that even the labels applied
to the opposing camps are contentious. Abortion rights lobbyists prefer to be
called pro-choice rather than pro-abortion, which is understandable.

“Pro-abortion” implies that they think sucking a foetus out
of the womb and dumping it in a plastic-lined bin is a good thing, which surely
can’t be the case. “Pro-choice” frames the issue much more inoffensively as an
issue of women’s rights rather than babies’ deaths.

Conversely, “anti-abortion” suggests a hard, unsympathetic line
and may even conjure up images of the fanatics who firebomb abortion clinics.
“Pro-life” puts a friendlier, more positive spin on the anti-abortion stance.

We can expect to hear more from these groups after the Abortion
Supervisory Committee, in its latest report, recommended a review of the
40-year-old legislation that sets out the circumstances in which abortions may
legally be carried out. Like it or not, we’re back in the old minefield.

Abortion rights activists took the report as the cue to
mount a fresh campaign for liberalisation of the law, as the committee surely must
have known they would.

The activists were quick to pick up the committee’s
statement that some of the language in the Contraception, Sterilisation and
Abortion (CSA) Act is sexist and outdated, as if that somehow renders the entire
legislation invalid.

Outdated language can be easily fixed, but highlighting the
issue is a clever propaganda tactic because it portrays the Act as a quaint
hangover from an era when men supposedly told women what to do.

In truth, the renewed debate is about much more than
semantics. Complaints about sexist language are a smokescreen, because merely
making the Act gender-neutral wouldn’t achieve the activists’ objective.

When they talk about “reviewing” the legislation, what they
really mean is rewriting it to make abortion available on request – their goal
since the 1970s.

The committee has obligingly opened the door a crack and the
abortion rights lobby has jammed its foot into the gap, as the committee possibly
intended.

The abortion rights lobby wants abortion decriminalised –
that is to say, no longer treated as an offence under the Crimes Act, which
they regard as an anachronism.

To all intents and purposes the provision relating to
abortion in the Crimes Act is negated anyway by the CSA Act, which enables the Crimes
Act to be legally sidestepped.

Nonetheless, the fact that abortion remains in the Crimes Act serves a symbolic purpose. It's a reminder that abortion involves extinguishing a life, no matter how hard the pro-choice lobby tries to disguise the fact.

Friday, March 10, 2017

I find myself in the
unfamiliar situation of being in agreement with Winston Peters. The New Zealand First
leader thinks the police have lost the plot, and so do I.

Peters has attacked the
police for wanting to curtail the right of people to take their own wine and
beer to race meetings. He uses his customary blustering rhetoric, describing the
police as politically correct wowsers and comparing them with Nazis.

But he’s right when he says government
policy should recognise that the vast majority of New Zealanders treat alcohol
responsibly – a fact wilfully ignored by zealots in the police hierarchy, the
public health sector and the universities, who think we’re all helpless drunks.

Peters is also undoubtedly correct
when he predicts that a prohibition on people taking their own alcohol to race
meetings would soon become a blanket ban on alcohol at other community events,
and possibly even family picnics.

The latest police proposal
surfaced in a briefing paper on ways to reduce “alcohol-related harm” – three
words that I suspect the staff at Police Headquarters in Wellington are
required to chant for five minutes at the start of every working day to remind
them of their primary mission.

The briefing paper identified
BYO alcohol at race meetings as a “key issue”. This caused immediate alarm on
the West Coast, where the Kumara race meeting, at which people have
traditionally been allowed to drink their own alcohol, is a signature event on
the social calendar.

West Coast mayor Bruce Smith
says that if the police get their way, they will kill off an event that has
been attracting West Coast families for 134 years. And you can be sure the
Kumara races won’t be the only meeting affected.

I’ve often attended the races
at the picturesque Tauherenikau course, in the Wairarapa. It’s an old-style,
family-friendly country race meeting that attracts people from Wellington as
well from the Wairarapa.

As at Kumara, people are
allowed to take their own liquor. Many racegoers arrive early and set up picnic
tables under the trees, often in the same spot they’ve occupied for years. There are no bag searches or
other controls.

And you know what? In all the
years I’ve been attending the Tauherenikau races, I don’t think I’ve ever seen
anyone who was visibly drunk, still less behaving badly. The police are barely visible.

Yet the police hierarchy
claims to have identified race meetings as a “key” cause of alcohol-related
harm. This represents the latest step in a long campaign by police to redefine
themselves as moral custodians whose primary function is not so much to prevent
crime or catch crooks as to protect society from its own foolishness.

There have been innumerable
examples in recent years of this Mother Hen approach to policing. In
Wellington, police have subjected bar owners to such harassment that the city’s
most experienced and respected hospitality operator – a man whose bars and restaurants have an exemplary record – declared last year that bar owners now saw the
police as the opposition, not an ally.

Heavy-handed policing was
also blamed when the once spectacularly successful Wellington Rugby Sevens fell
out of favour with the public. It just wasn’t fun anymore.

It’s significant that Peters
has now taken hold of this issue. No politician has a keener nose for public
discontent, and his nostrils will be twitching more than ever in an election
year when his party stands a good chance of holding the balance of power.

He will have noted that the single-minded,
anti-liquor mindset adopted by the police hierarchy is putting officers offside
with the community they are paid to serve.

I picked up a sudden, unmistakeable
change of mood a couple of summers ago, when – without prompting from me – friends
began expressing their irritation about being breath-tested on their way to
work, or complaining about the bullying demeanour of police officers at outdoor
events where people were harmlessly (and legally) enjoying a drink.

I have also noted a growing
public feeling that police priorities are cockeyed and their resources misused.
Ninety per cent of burglaries go unsolved and victims of crime frequently complain
that calls to the police go unheeded.

A business owner told me last
week that even when he provided the police with video footage of organised
shoplifters at work, and evidence of their identity, no action was taken. Yet
the police always seem to have enough officers for alcohol checkpoints, even in
places and at times of day when the likelihood of catching drunk drivers must
be minimal.

If I’m hearing this, the
politicians must be hearing it too. Likewise, police officers in the community
must be aware of mounting dissatisfaction.

What should especially
concern the police and government is that the grumbling is coming not from the
usual habitual complainers, but from conservative, law-abiding people – the type
whose natural inclination is to respect and support the police. It takes a
special sort of incompetence – or perhaps I should say dogmatic zeal – to
alienate your best friends.

Saturday, March 4, 2017

I shudder when I see someone advocating a hate speech law.
So should we all.

Police commissioner Mike Bush didn’t go so far as actually
advocating a law prohibiting “hate speech”, however that may be defined, but
obviously it was on his mind. In fact he’s talked to the Human Rights
Commission about it.

I imagine it would have been a meeting of minds. After all,
it’s the nature of bureaucracies to want their powers expanded.

Combine this with the pervasive school of thought in modern
government which holds that a feckless society needs paternalistic minders to
keep it from getting into trouble, and almost any busybody law becomes
possible.

If we were to have speech police, could George Orwell’s
Thought Police be far behind?

A hate speech law would mark a radical and dangerous
extension of existing police powers: from protecting people and property
against clearly identifiable threats, such as assault and theft, to making value
judgments about whether a citizen has crossed the blurry line between fair
comment and something much darker.

Such a law would be welcomed by activist minority groups which
want the state to protect them from any comment they see as hurtful or
oppressive. But freedom of speech is far too precious in a democracy to be
undermined by subjective judgments from police officers about what constitutes
incitement to “hate” as opposed to a robust expression of legitimate opinion.

Happily, on this occasion both Justice Minister Amy Adams
and Police Minister Paula Bennett squashed Bush’s idea. They rightly pointed out that existing laws are
perfectly capable of dealing with public statements likely to incite hostility
against, for instance, ethnic or religious minorities. Check out Section 61 of
the Human Rights Act, for starters.

Anyway, what was Bush doing raising the matter in the first
place? Since when was it the role of the Police Commissioner to suggest new
laws that would restrict fundamental liberties such as the right of free
speech?

The job of the police is to enforce laws passed by
Parliament, not to publicly float their own ideas about what might be necessary
for society’s wellbeing. We don’t need activist public servants stepping beyond
their remit.

Most New Zealanders would probably prefer Bush to devote his
energy to reducing the scandalous burglary rate, or ensuring that the police
respond promptly to calls from victims of crime rather than fobbing people off - as happens all too often - by saying they’re busy with other things.

But the commissioner’s action is entirely consistent with
the role police have increasingly taken upon themselves, which is that of moral
custodians. Already we have seen, in recent years, a marked change in the way
the police view their duties.

Traditionally their function was to protect people against
lawbreakers and to apprehend criminals. But the modern New Age police take a
much broader view of their role. They have morphed into mother hens, constantly
clucking about all the things we’re doing wrong. They think we need to be
protected against ourselves.

This is most conspicuous in matters relating to alcohol
consumption. The police have a legitimate interest in minimising the road toll,
but their moralistic crusades against drinking resemble nothing so much as the
shrill campaigns of late-19th century prohibitionists who were
convinced that liquor would be the ruin of us all.

They need to be reminded that alcohol consumption is not
only legal, but for centuries has been the lubricant of social intercourse and
celebration.

Of course a small minority of people drink to excess and
behave badly, which brings me to the woman who was videoed shouting abuse at a group
of Muslims in Huntly recently.

Bush seized this as justification for a discussion about the need for hate crime legislation. But Newstalk ZB talkback host Tim Beveridge got to the heart
of the matter when he said the real problem in the Huntly incident wasn’t
racism or xenophobia; it was drunkenness.

The question, then, is whether an isolated outburst from a
pathetic drunk justifies a senior public servant talking about the need for hate
speech laws. Most people would probably think we need a far higher threshold
than that.

As for Bush, he has some ground to make up. He got off to an
unpromising start in his job, being the cop who delivered a glowing eulogy at
the funeral of the detective who framed Arthur Allan Thomas, and his public
image hasn’t improved with recent publicity suggesting he was evasive about
declaring an old drink-driving conviction.

Perhaps he should pull his head in and concentrate on his core functions.

About Me

I am a freelance journalist and columnist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. In the presence of Greenies I like to boast that I walk to work each day - I've paced it out and it's about 15 metres. I write about all sorts of stuff: politics, the media, music, wine, films, cycling and anything else that piques my interest - even sport, though I admit I don't have the intuitive understanding of sport that most New Zealand males absorb as if by osmosis. I'm a former musician (bass and guitar) with a lifelong love of music that led me to write my book 'A Road Tour of American Song Titles: From Mendocino to Memphis', published by Bateman NZ in July 2016. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and like many journalists I know a little bit about a lot of things and probably not enough about anything. I have never won any journalism awards.